Barry Goldberg, Blues Keyboardist and Part of Bob Dylan’s Newport Band, Dead at 83

As he took his seat at the organ behind Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965, Barry Goldberg wasn’t sure what would happen. “At the beginning, it was just a gig,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “Bob said, ‘You want to play with me tonight?’ I wasn’t a folkie or knew how serious those people were. We started doing our thing, playing that song [‘Like a Rolling Stone’]. At the end, there were boos but also cheers. They felt betrayed by him. But Bob was creating a new kind of music, and after we were done, everyone knew how special it was.”

Goldberg, a self-effacing musician who specialized in blues-based songwriting and keyboard playing and was a go-to musician for many rock and pop greats, died Wednesday at 83 from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. His death was announced by his friend and publicist, Bob Merlis.

Goldberg’s temporary gig with Dylan — two songs out of the four played on that now-legendary day when Dylan went electric and announced he was no longer just a folk singer — was recently immortalized in director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. (Goldberg himself wasn’t portrayed in the scene.) But it was just one of many times that Goldberg made his impact on rock history.

As the keyboardist in the Electric Flag, he was a member of one of the first interracial blues bands. With lyricist Gerry Goffin, he co-wrote Gladys Knight and the Pips’ intense 1974 hit “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination,” and that’s Goldberg’s organ on Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ garage anthem “Devil with a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly,” a no. 4 hit in 1966. (Bruce Springsteen later covered that song at the 1979 No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden.)

Goldberg’s keyboard-playing or songwriting was also heard on albums by the Flying Burrito Brothers (he and Gram Parsons co-wrote “Do You Know How It Feels” on The Gilded Palace of Sin), Leonard Cohen (Death of a Ladies’ Man) the Ramones (End of the Century), and more. Goldberg was also a member of the Rides, a blues-rock band formed in 2012 with Stephen Stills and guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

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“You don’t always hear his name thrown around, but he was around for so many of the most pivotal moments of rock & roll history,” says Shepherd. “He left a massive imprint. He was there and did it all. You could make a movie of his life.”

Born Christmas Day, 1941 (his uncle Arthur Goldberg was a US Supreme Court Justice), Goldberg grew up with music; his mother was a boogie woogie pianist. But Goldberg quickly swept up in blues thanks to his local radio. “At 13 and 14, I was listening to my little transistor radio and was into rock & roll: Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard,” he told RS. “But one night I went to the end of the dial at midnight and heard this amazing [DJ] who said, ‘I’m going to take you down to the basement now — turn on a blue light and we’re gonna dig some blues.’ And it just flipped me out, all the reverb and harmonica. I said, ‘Oh my God, this is supernatural music.’ It cast a spell. I couldn’t talk to any of my buddies in school about it: ‘The blues, what is that?’ They were into rock. Rock & roll is great but this was another sense of freedom in my own little bedroom, and it took me into another world.”

Along with fellow local upstarts like harp player Paul Butterfield and Goldberg’s Central YMCA High School high school friend, guitarist Michael Bloomfield, Goldberg began immersing himself in the music, even seeing some of genre’s giants in town. It was Bloomfield (who also backed Dylan at Newport and is portrayed in A Complete Unknown) who egged Goldberg into venturing into some of the intimidating blues clubs in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Michael said to me, ‘You should come down with me and play with me,’” Goldberg told RS. “I thought this was amazing, such a bold move. No one ever crossed those lines in Chicago. It was dangerous, put it that way. There were gangs. But Michael borrowed his mother’s car and we went to a club called Silvio’s. I said, ‘Michael, you’re crazy.’

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“But the force of the blues is what drove us,” he continued. “We wanted to learn so bad from the masters. We walked in and it was like that scene in Animal House: ‘Wait until Otis see us!’ Howlin’ Wolf saw us in the club and a hush came over. It was really freaky. There we were, these little white guys. We were freaks: ‘What do these kids want? What are they doing here?’ But Wolf invited us up and we did ‘Killing Floor,’ and that was it for me.”

Thanks to Bloomfield, Goldberg was quickly enlisted to back Dylan at Newport, after which Goldberg formed a blues band with fellow Chicagoan Steve Miller. When Miller wound up leaving for San Francisco and fame of his own, Goldberg released an album, Blowing My Mind, with the Barry Goldberg Blues Band. In 1967, he and Bloomfield were among the founding members of the Electric Flag, which pioneered the blending of blues, rock and roll, pop and horns, especially on its first album, A Long Time Comin’, and the group’s performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival that year was widely seen as one of its highlights.

The Flag didn’t last long, but Goldberg’s career continued on various fronts. At the urging of Dylan, he made a 1974 solo album that Dylan himself produced — the only known occasion of Dylan sitting in the producer’s chair for another artist — but Goldberg always seemed more comfortable behind the scenes. In addition to the Pips hit, he and Goffin also wrote “It’s Not the Spotlight,” a gently swaying hit for Bobby Blue Bland that was also covered by Rod Stewart.

“I don’t think Barry ever wanted to be a frontman,” says Shepherd. “He would like to do a little gig here and there on his own, but I think he was very comfortable in his role as the keyboard player. His real passion was songwriting.”

In later years, Goldberg was the keyboardist and co-songwriting in the Rides, which recorded two albums, and he toured with the band as well. He was one of the central figures in the recent documentary Born in Chicago and also headed the Chicago Blues Reunion, a revolving-membership band that included other veterans of the scene, including singer Nick Gravenites, former Butterfield drummer Sam Lay, harp player Charlie Musselwhite and Corky Siegel.

Reflecting on his career to RS, Goldberg said, “We stayed true to our roots and we played that kind of music and went on to play rock, and we carried the blues with us. It gave rock more feeling and soul. It added more depth and feeling, more realness to the music. Whatever hardships you come from in your family background, the blues is your therapy.”